1 comments about Love Across Color Lines.

1. A decade ago no one had heard of Ottilie Assing or had a clue that she played an important role not only in shaping European perceptions of the US in the crucial years up to and including the Civil War but in her role as collaborator and lover of Douglass for almost 30 years. Then, Terence Pickett, a scholar of German literature doing research in Poland, stumbled on a folder of letters that revealed an intimate acquaintance and passionate involvement between the German immigrant journalist and the American abolitionist. Pickett cautiously called it a friendship, but when William McFeeley used this information in his 1991 Douglass biography, he strongly suspected that the relationship went beyond friendship. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., choosing his words carefully, has meanwhile also concluded that for "much of Douglass's mature career, Assing was his principal intellectual consort." Maria Diedrich's "Love Across Color Lines" finally gives a detailed and thoroughly researched account of the life of this extraordinary woman, her background, commitment to radical causes, emigration in 1852, involvement in abolitionism, passionate attachment to Douglass, and her courageous but tragic end. It is an amazing story, deeply embedded in the stormy social and political conditions on both sides of the Atlantic. One consistent theme is that Assing's commitment to social revolution, having been frustrated by the botched events of 1848-49 in Germany, plays itself out in her support of radical abolitionism, which she consistently sees in terms of a second American Revolution. Another suggestive argument develops the continuity between Assing's partly Jewish background and her attitude toward slavery and race in the US. Though Assing often expressed typical 19th-century racial attitudes, her experience of belonging to a despised minority in Germany helped her to espouse the cause of black Americans, sometimes with more radical passion than Douglass himself. Most original and interesting, moreover, is Diedrich's carefully argued idea that Assing's imagination was infused with the romanticized representation of a black African prince and a white European woman in a novel by one of her close German friends, who based it on Aphra Behn's "Oroonoko." With all of Assing's emphasis on rational social analysis, much of her relationship with Douglass must be explained in terms of the kind of romantic orientalism that shaped her imagination. As Diedrich makes clear in her narrative, the essential problem of writing this biography was the one-sidedness of the evidence. Assing destroyed all letters (hundreds of them) from Douglass; he destroyed all but 27 from her to him, and he mentions her only in passing in his third autobiography. The story that emerges is largely based on Ottilie's letters to her sister and friends, on her published journalism, and on a handful of manuscripts. But the circumstantial evidence--that Douglass and Assing corresponded more or less weekly for more than 25 years, that during those years Assing spent several months every summer with the Douglasses, and that Douglass often visited and stayed with Assing in Hoboken (seeking refuge there when he was in imminent danger of arrest after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry)--strongly suggests that her passion was reciprocated and that theirs was an intense intellectual and a fully sexual relationship. Aside from these important and fascinating details (which include the highly probable fact that Assing actually ghost-wrote some of Douglass's journalism in "The New National Era"), one of the great strengths of this book is that it places these personal matters in the larger framework of social and political conditions: the abolitionist movement, women's emancipation, the Civil War, Washington politics, the crusades for the Civil Rights amendments in the 1870s, and much more. Diedrich offers us a profound and nuanced insight into how this complex interracial relationship between two committed social radicals could develop in an America rife with political turmoil as well as racial and sexual taboos. The fact that this compelling story has remained veiled for so long is yet another reminder that these taboos continue to exert their fearful power in our own time. Maria Diedrich deserves everyone's gratitude for lifting the veil so thoughtfully, tactfully, and definitively.

   Christoph Lohmann Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies, Indiana University

No comments about Newswalker - A Story for Sweeney.

2 comments about Waterline: Of Fathers, Sons, and Boats (Nonpareil Book).

1. If you grew up around an old wood boat, Chris Craft, Century, Hacker or one of the many others, you will be capitivated by Joe Soucheray's account of his resurrection of "the boat his dad gave away to settle a $90 storage bill". While the boat Joe first finds is the same model and it isn't til later on that he does locate his dad's boat, Joe still lavishes a considerable amount of emotional and financial attention to this project. I'm working on a similar project with a 1947 Chris Craft. I have no ties to this boat like Joe had for his, but it is truly a labor of love for me to strip, repair, sand, fair, stain and varnish this boat. I consider it water-borne art. Every week while working on this boat, I pick up Waterline and re-read a chapter. Joe's descriptions of the various personalities in this saga are riveting. You will enjoy the story immensely.



2. I first read Joseph Olshan's book "The Nightswimmer" and was truly intrigued by the tale of Will Kaplan. And how his love of swimming and of the ocean play in his life. Then I found this book, "The Waterline", which featured Billy Kaplan, who loved to swim. In both novels, things that are precious and special to Billy/Will are taken away by the water. In "The Waterline", the story is told by three important voices-by his parents, Susan and Michael and by young Billy. Each tale their sides of the story of the one fateful summer day when a drowing took the life of a young boy and what Billy knew. Billy was only seven when this happen and for long 15 years, he and parents sort out what has happened and how to "make things right" again. The only person who truly understands what Billy is going through is his mothers sister, Rita. Rita was traumatized in her young life and can completely relate to what has happened to Billy, that she helps him long distance to find his resolve. I highly recomend this book and that anyone should read "The Nightswimmer" after. Billy /Will lead and interesting life and to find closure. No matter how long it takes.

1 comments about The Working Press.

1. You may have trouble finding this little book, but if you can find it, it may be worth a look.
   
   It's nothing really startling, but what you will gain is an interesting perspective on how much the print news gathering business must have changed since the mid-1960s.
   
   Ruth Adler, as editor and compiler, has gathered short, two or three page written scenes from many reporters for the New York Times. I recognized only a few names, such as Russell Baker and David Halberstam, but then I never did read the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times has always been my paper, since I have always lived in Los Angeles.
   
   What I learned, for one thing, is how difficult it must have been for reporters in those days to get their stories out by teletype machines or simply by telephone, since that was the peak of existing technology at that time. Oh what changes the Internet has wrought!
   
   Read this book and see how news reporting must have changed. Learn about reporting in the South during the Civil Rights era. Learn about reporting from Communist and paranoid Russia and its satellites; about a supposedly Jewish fellow who claimed to belong to the KKK; about reporting from Africa, almost impossible in those days, unless you were willing to sit by the teletyper for hours on end.
   
   Learn about the mad scramble at the Times plant when the power went out in New York City. They still got their paper out, and the process is interesting.
   
   Well, as noted, being from Los Angeles, I'm not really as big a New York Times fan as Ruth Adler, but the book did teach me much about those times and about journalism as a profession, one to which I at one time aspired. I can see now, it's a more difficult profession, especially reporting from overseas, than I had suspected.
   
   Diximus.

No comments about Reputation: Portraits in Power.

No comments about Prison Diary, Argentina.

1 comments about The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon.

1. Chance Harvey has produced a real page-turner for devotees of New Orleans literature. Lyle Saxon's stature as one of the inventors of the New Orleans and Louisiana image (along with Lafcadio Hearn, Grace King and G.W. Cable) is well-known; but the man behind the mask is not. Ms. Harvey's narrative is well-balanced-she never loses perspective or sympathy for this self-tormented soul as he descends into alcoholism and depression. His relationships with Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner are well described, as is the dawn of the Roaring 20s in New York.

   Nits I would I pick-and these are minor: There should have been a few more pages about his influence on the revival of the French Quarter in the 1920s. His influence on, and unselfish patronage of, struggling writers is alluded to but never brightly illuminated. Also, an afterwords listing the further lives and fates of his close friends would have been a nice coda.

   All in all, this is one of those essential books for those who want to 'drill down' into the image and literary richness of New Orleans and Louisiana.

2 comments about The Night the Wheels Fell Off: More Tales About Family, Growing Up, and Other Goofy Stuff.

1. This book is a collection of anecdotes about the author, his family and friends. They are told in a thoughtful and insightful manner, with large doses of humor thrown into the works. The trials and triumphs, which exist in everyone's life, are treated with love, admiration and humor. These hilarious anecdotes will hit close to home and heart for the reader.



2. Ok, I'm in the middle of this book and I'm averaging about 3 to 4 good laughs per page and sometimes more.. The way this guy writes makes you feel like he's sitting across the coffee table, kicked back and telling stories from his childhood, family and life.. He makes you feel like a friend.
   
   
   The stories he tells take me back to MY childhood and make me remember things I didn't know I'd forgotten.. He captures the essence of childhood, because even though the we didn't have the same experiences, there's still a common thread.. I catch myself staring off and remembering... then snap back to the book to discover the next funny event or warm memory.
   
   I think everyone will really enjoy this book. Especially if you were ever a kid. And if you weren't, then you need to read this book and see how it's done. *ha ha ha*
   
   It's just as great as his other book about childhood, life's happenings and good funnies: "Six of One, Half Dozen of Another" .. Good times folks, good times.

1 comments about Travels With My Royal: A Memoir Of The Writing Life (The Basque Series).

1. Most of Robert Laxalt's books incorporate some kind of personal reminiscence -- whether it's his arrestingly beautiful portraits of life in the Basque Country or his semi-autobiographical trilogy about a Basque-American family in the West -- but "Travels with My Royal" is his only forthright memoir of his childhood and life as a writer. For fifty years an inseparable mechanical friend traveled alongside him -- his portable Royal typewriter. A gift from his mother, he took it all over the world and wrote all of his books and magazine articles on it.

   Born in Alturas, California, in 1923, (a place that became a ghost town not long after), Laxalt was raised in Carson City, Nevada, the second son in a family of immigrant French Basques. His father, Dominique, was a former livestock baron (a "baron of sorts") who saw his flock of over 60,000 sheep and cattle wiped out by a ranch crash and a freeze in the early 1920s. Consequently, he had to go back into the hills and build up his fortune again, slowly, living the hard life of a sheepherder, separated most of the year from his family. Economic woes marked Laxalt's childhood. He mentions how ashamed he was that his mother, who ran an otherwise respectable Basque boardinghouse, sold whiskey on the sly during Prohibition. At school he was often taunted for being the son of a bootlegger.

   Yet the family eventually got on its feet again, and after spending a year in the Belgian Congo during World War II, Laxalt graduated from the University of Nevada and began to forge a successful career in journalism. His first book, "Sweet Promised Land" (1957), recounts his father Dominique's return to his birthplace in the Basque Country, St. Jean Pied-de-Port up in the French Pyrenees, fifty years after he left it, and the emotional recognition that his real home was not there, but in the hills of western Nevada. In print for over forty years, "Sweet Promised Land" was Laxalt's most resounding success, even though he confesses in "Travels with My Royal" that it was torture to write.

   Laxalt wrote 16 more books (fiction and non-fiction) before his death earlier this year, and was a regular contributor to National Geographic (he discusses his long love-hate relationship with that magazine in this book). He also taught at the University of Nevada, was the director of its press, and helped found the Basque Studies Program there. Anyone interested in the Basques will soon learn that Laxalt has done more than probably any other writer to help us understand their world.

   If you're not already familiar with Laxalt's books, read a few first. Here he talks about how works like "Sweet Promised Land" and "In a Hundred Graves" came about, and if you haven't read them, some of it will go over your head.

No comments about American Journalists: Getting the Story (Oxford Profiles).